A thought about ice powers

In-game, as well as superhero portrayals in many venues, ice powers seem to be displayed as being "pushed" from the caster to the target.

Its been decades since high school science, but I seem to recall that cold was an absence of heat, that is, that heat had been drawn away. Is this correct?

If so, would it not be more accurate for a ice power to create cold or ice by "pulling", paracitically drawing heat from the intended target? In essence a ice blaster would be a living, overpowered heat sink. Of course, this could cause issues if there was no easy way to dispel the received heat. An ice/fire blaster would be one solution.

This is not to say that a technological solution could not push a stored, frozen mixture out. My fall in front of a snow-blower on the ski slopes taught me that much.

Thoughts?

It depends on the portrayal. Most ice throwers are shown throwing actual ice. Some, like Mr. Freeze and Captain Cold, are firing beams of what could be called "Negative Energy," so the cold is an after-effect.

Others, however, who seem to make areas colder (Robert Drake) are certainly portrayed as pushing cold into the environment instead of withdrawing the heat. I think you have a good point there.

Well, like you said, you can force cold along. I'm sure most people are familiar with opening a freezer or an attic crawlspace in winter and having the cold air "spill" out as it displaces the warmer, less dense, air. I assume the ice folk are just generating intense cold at the point of origin (them) and focusing it along a path towards the villain.

Thank you for shedding a blinding absence of darkness on this subject!

I actually entered the physics program when I started college (lo many years ago) to be able to justify comic book powers in more scientific terms. Or, more accurately, pseudo-scientific.

I can't remember WHO, but I'm pretty sure there was a comic book character who drew the heat from foes, making them cold, but in the process that character got VERY VERY hot, since the character was absorbing, gaining extra heat from targets.

As noted, an ice/fire (or fire/ice) build works great for this concept. Wish I could remember what the character was... could draw heat out of foes (making them cold) and then expel the excess energy as heat. So, yah, essentially could "shoot" cold OR heat.

I was about to rail against the cold-projectors who wear parkas --- why would they need warming gear if their powers drew heat from targets. But of course they probably aren't using their powers ALL THE TIME or they'd constantly be surrounded by ice. But if their physiology is such that they CAN absorb heat from external sources into their body, when they are NOT doing that, I can see where their body would be too cold and need extra warming (eg. parkas). So I guess a cold "projector" could certainly feel cold --- until the character drew heat from an external source.

All this said, yah, throwing ice is just a different (more primitive, less powerful) aspect of "cold generation" powers.

What I wanna know is why is ice bolt described as throwing "icy daggers" and yet it deals cold/smash damage rather than cold/lethal? To be honest, I'm not complaining, but clearly someone either could only throw daggers and hit with the pommels or blunt sides (a possibility since it can be hard to do), or simply did not know what kind of damage a dagger would be classified as.

Excerpt for reference:
"Ice Bolt quickly pelts an enemy with small icy daggers; their chill Slows a foe's attacks and movement for a time. Fast, but little damage."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Pushing or shooting a cold object, like a snowball (we'll forget about cold beams for a second), might work like this: To create the snowball, the person draws heat out of the air in a specific area (and we'll imagine a perfect snowball forms, sure). This alone would be an example of negative entropy, which is a violation of thermodynamics, so let's take it a step further. That heat has to go somewhere, so let's say that it is drawn towards the user, and then released. The heat spontaneously disperses to reach equilibrium, something we would expect, and if this happens in the air a shockwave would be released. I don't have the numbers to do the exact specifics, but let's say that the force of the shockwave is sufficient to propel the newly formed snowball forward (off the top of my head, I'm guessing that it likely wouldn't, and if it did it would rattle the user's teeth in the process). This might explain how Iceman, for instance, climbs uphill on his ice slide from a dead start.

Transferring and sequestering heat like this is something that things like refrigerators, air conditioners, and the human body are good at, but it comes at a price. That price is heat. Whatever energy was expended to draw that heat away would have to be larger than the amount of heat that was drawn away, and in the process that heat expended would be lost to thermodynamic equilibrium as well. Making snowballs out of thin air is a costly process, regardless of whether or not they fly places on their own. Additionally, it would likely be a rather noisy power to have.

I've an technology ice/ice tanker that I envision functioning as a giant heat sink. Energy Absorption pulls the heat in, Fireball (epic power) releases it. Sometimes overloads into the Self Destruction power

This is more a question of theme than it is of science, I would think. When people think "ice powers," they immediately picture someone who can turn portions of the city into little slices of Antarctica, thereby freezing their opponents via environmental exposure. Or so it looks to be going in terms of theme. You are not directly drawing heat away from your enemy, you are hurling "cold" at them. In scientific terms, cold is merely the absence of heat, but for comic book purposes, throwing ice which then chills the target is pretty much interchangeable with "hurling cold."

If we want to get into the thermodynamics of it, we'd have to explain this not via heat drawn from the target to the caster, but head drawn from the target into the artificial environment created by the caster, and then either stored or dissipated into the atmosphere or the ground. We already have an example of nevermelting ice in the game, in the face of... Well, Nevermelting Ice, so just having ice which draws heat away from the target but does not heat up and melt is not out of the question. Additionally, it's not too hard to explain an environment which is not cold because its temperature is merely low, but an environment that acts as a heat sink, drawing heat away from the target and dispersing it over a wide area.

In the very simplest of terms, freeze someone to the ground and the ice chills the target while the ground chills the ice. A large concrete sidewalk isn't rally going to heat up much from the body heat of a single person anyway. It's a theme that goes back to cold air - winter and Arctic environments present air cold enough to sink heat out of the body, yet which does not seem to heat up in any detectable way in doing so because this drawn head dissipates very quickly.

In other words, we're not drawing heat from our enemies, we are throwing ice at them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I remember my science teacher in Jr. high once used compressed gas to make ice by injecting it into a sealed container. As the gas expanded, it "used up" the thermal energy in the container and dropped the temperature below the freezing point of the gas.

I liked Frozone's limitation. He needed moisture in the air to get things to work.

(Disclaimer: I like ice based powers, and I'm perfectly fine with fictional characters throwing cold beams around. I just like discussions like this, and I haven't been on the boards for many moons...)

The interesting thing about cold or heat based powers is that "hot" and "cold" are intensely relative terms, and not only to each other. Temperature is essentially the average kinetic energy of all the particles in a mass, and it's related to the density of the mass as well (but it's more of an extrinsic relation, since specific heat has more to do with mass). A character with, say, spatial manipulation powers could intensely chill an area by simply "spreading" things out. The basic idea behind the ideal gas law would come into play, and the average energy goes down, so the temp would as well. The amount of heat would remain the same in this case. There are lots of ways a character could cause cold to happen without moving heat anywhere. I like Ultimate Reed Richard's idea in Ultimate...well I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but they were fighting Ultimate Galactus. Reed's idea was to connect a small portal between his universe and a younger, hotter universe. Thermodynamic equilibrium kicked in once the two were connected, and the resulting geyser of energy, aimed properly, made a very powerful weapon.

And then there's the property of specific heat, which is basically the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of a certain amount of something by a certain number of degrees. Water has one of the highest specific heats around, meaning that the same amount of energy that will raise the temperature of a pot of water by one degree will raise a similar pot of, say, ethanol, much more. So with a guy like Frozone, who needs ambient moisture to work his magic, I wonder if he might just find it easier to throw liquid nitrogen balls at badguys. A character that pulls heat out of the air to make ice balls is probably better off just redirecting that heat so that it lands in the badguy's sinuses, or lights his pants on fire, or makes his knife red-hot. Better bang for your buck that way, then just pick up the ice ball and throw it.

what the OP is confused by is that the character cannot affect the target as an indirect attack. They affect them as a ray

ColdKid draws the heat from the air at his hand, then a few inches further out, then a few feet further out, then across the room, then from their foe.

He isn't pushing cold at his foe. He is drawing heat from the air in a line from their hand to their foe.